Monthly Archives: March 2014

I’m not a Maven maven, but more of a Maven klutz. Nonetheless, I’ve managed to push a Mavenized version of JHOVE to Github that compiles for me. I haven’t tried to do anything beyond compiling. If anyone would like to help clean it up, please do.

This kills the continuity of file histories which Andy worked so hard to preserve, since Maven has its own ideas of where files should be. The histories are available under the deleted files in their old locations, if you look at the original commit.

There’s been enough encouragement in email and Twitter to my proposal to move JHOVE to Github that I’ll be going ahead with it. Andy Jackson has told me he has some almost-finished work to migrate the CVS history along with the project, so I’m waiting on that for the present. Watch this space for more news.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been neglectful of JHOVE since last September, when 1.11 came out. Issues are continuing to arise, and people are still using it, and I’m not getting anything done about them.

The problem is that my current job has rather long hours, and when I come home from it, looking at more Java code isn’t at the top of my list of things to do. I’m very glad people are still using JHOVE, close to a decade after I started work on it as a contractor to the Harvard Library, but I’m not getting anything actually done.

It would help if there were more contributions from others, and its being on the moribund SourceForge isn’t helping. I think I could undertake the energy to move it to Github, where more contributors might be interested. There’s already a Mavenized version by Andy Jackson there, which doesn’t include the Java source code but provides some important scaffolding and pom.xml files. It probably makes sense to start by forking this. This migration should also make the horrible JHOVE build procedure easier.

If this is something you’d like to see, let me know. I’d like some reassurance that this will actually help before I start.